The dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean a cessation of class struggle, but its continuation in a new form and with new instruments. So long as classes remain, so long as the bourgeoisie overthrown in one country redoubles its attacks on socialism on an international scale, so long is this dictatorship necessary. The class of small peasants cannot help but experience, in the transition epoch, a series of waverings. The difficulties of the transition period, the influence of the bourgeoisie, inevitably call forth from time to time waverings in the mood of this mass. Upon the proletariat, weakened and to a certain degree déclassé by the destruction of its life-basis—large-scale machine industry—there falls a most difficult and the greatest historical task: to hold firm against these

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